REVIEWS: Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a Theory Of Emancipatory Politics by Michael Neocosmos, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016. Pp. 674, $45 (pbk).

Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a Theory Of Emancipatory Politics by Michael Neocosmos Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016. Pp. 674, $45 (pbk).

It is rare that an academic text escapes the page and infiltrates your daily life. That you find yourself unwittingly referencing it as you go about your professional and even personal activities. That your well-formulated assessment of what you thought you knew begins to crack, and you find yourself revisiting passages to help make sense of things that once appeared settled. It is even rarer when this text is a 600+ page tome that blends sociology, history, philosophy and Africana Studies in a seamless mix without any regard for the conventions that most such works mechanistically cling to.

Michael Neocosmos's magnum opus, Thinking Freedom in Africa, was my steady companion during the summer of 2018. I leaned on it when addressing a gathering of African social movements in Dakar, Senegal. In Jaffna, Sri Lanka I drew on it as I spoke with graduate students who were trying to make sense of the failure of revolutionary nationalism. Back in the USA, I shamelessly cribbed part of the title, ‘Thinking Freedom’, for a conversation on race, class and popular movements.

Neocosmos's tome contains multitudes. Attempting to review a work that ranges from the 13th century Mandé Charter to the Haitian Revolution on through the history of 20th century Marxist thought, anti-colonial struggles and all the way to contemporary South African social movements in a few paragraphs feels petty. So I won't. Instead, I want to pose a series of questions for the author. Hopefully, they provide you, the reader, with a sense of both the depth and range of this work. And ideally, they motivate you to wade through it yourself as I believe any scholar of African politics and popular...